Ever wonder why you aren’t getting as many visits from Google or Bing as
you used to?

Perhaps you’d like to make sure that SEO specialist you've been paying is
worth the money.

The answer to these challenges (and many more) is likely to be a thorough
audit of your website. Before we get into the details of what you can learn
from an SEO audit, let’s look at three surefire signs you need one in the
first place:

1. Your search rankings have fallen off.

If Google visits are dissipating and you can’t pinpoint a reason, it’s
better to find out sooner rather than later. Some basic technical problems
with your website can be easy to miss with the naked eye, and they can cost
you dearly in the rankings.

One website our team reviewed found that a team member had renamed a file
folder using two words, which included a space in the URL path. That minute
mistake was affecting their SEO. The potential is high for corrupted files,
broken links and a multitude of seemingly minuscule mistakes.

Dropping to the second page of Google’s search rankings can mean the loss
of thousands of visits per week. That’s likely to translate into a big drop
in inbound leads, and it could eventually cause your traffic to dry up.

SEO strategy requires meticulous attention to detail, and it takes a broad
array of skills to account for all the moving parts.

Many search consultants are good at finding keywords, tweaking content and
ordering citations, but they might lack technical aptitude needed to dig
into the coding side of things. In any case, there’s a chance your SEO pro
is not accounting for every detail that affects your visibility.

A website checkup is essentially an intensive look at the underlying code
on your website. It’s a way to see things through Google’s eyes.

An SEO audit should identify any issues that could be preventing you from
ranking highly in search engines. Common problems include:

Internal or outbound links that don’t have a valid destination

Links that can’t be crawled by search engine spiders

Page resources that redirect away from your website

Multiple variations of files in use on the same page

The many different forms of duplicate content

Special characters that can’t be properly read or indexed

Hidden files and missing access issues

The above is by no means an exhaustive list. This small sample of common
errors is just a reminder of how easy it is for marketers to miss issues
that can cause extensive damage to search visibility, digital marketing and
inbound lead generation.

These kinds of errors live “beneath the surface” of your website, so you
aren’t likely to detect them unless you know where (and how) to look. Your
talented web designer or search engine optimization consultant might not
know to look for them, either.

Ready to elevate your website’s potential?

Why guess whether your website is as visible to search engines as it could
be? To get started toward SEO success, here are four helpful tools for
conducting technical audits:

Screaming Frog, popular among experienced SEO professionals, lets you run your own
audit. It offers free (up to 500 URLs) and paid versions. There is a
desktop app.

SEOAudits
is a pay-per-service tool that provides detailed SEO reports and
recommendations.

SEO Spyder lets you run your own audit. It’s a nice resource for DIY types.

SEMRush
offers a subscription service, which comes with loads of help and
support.